Where the Light Fell

by Philip Yancey

The year I’m attending seventh grade, 1961, the National Book Award goes to Walker Percy, a novelist from Mississippi. When a reporter asks him why the South has produced so many great writers, he replies, “Because we lost the War.” His answer applies to a lot of questions about the South. Winners may forget. Losers don’t. Atlanta has reminders everywhere. Marching bands play “Dixie” at high school football games. State buildings fly a Georgia flag that incorporates Robert E. Lee’s battle flag. Historical plaques about the Battle of Atlanta dot the city, and I often ask Mother to pull over and let me read them. To the east hulks the granite bulge called Stone Mountain, with its massive carving of three Confederate heroes. A loyal Southern boy, I devour books about the Civil War. About as many soldiers died in it, I learn, as in all the other wars in which the United States has fought combined. The Confederacy began the war outnumbered four to one and ended it with one-third of its soldiers dead. The North’s strategy of draining Southern blood, regardless of the cost, ultimately worked. With only ten thousand residents, Atlanta was not even the capital of the state in the 1860s; Milledgeville had that honor. But key railroad lines converged in Atlanta, and General Sherman knew that if he cut those supply routes, he would strangle the Confederate armies. Sherman wrote to his wife, “I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple thousand men as a small affair, a kind of...